Motionloft founder must stay in jail pending fraud trail

A federal prosecutor urged a magistrate Wednesday to keep a former San Francisco technology executive in jail while he awaits trial on fraud charges, saying Jonathan Mills stole more than $600,000 from friends, fleeced his company and lied to everyone who questioned him.

Mills is "a horrendous candidate for release," Assistant U.S. Attorney Douglas Sprague said at a hearing a week after the 30-year-old entrepreneur's arrest. He scoffed at the defendant's claim of poverty and said Mills has "an unbelievable knack of getting money" from others.

U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth Laporte kept Mills in custody at the end of the hearing but granted his lawyer's request to take another look Thursday if Mills can come up with more financial support for a bond to secure his release.

Mills founded Motionloft Inc., which makes sensors for retail stores to track pedestrian and vehicle traffic, in 2010 and was its chief executive until shareholders removed him last December.

He is charged with defrauding a friend and physician out of $210,000, a sum the physician invested after Mills falsely claimed Cisco Systems had agreed to buy Motionloft for $760 million, according to investigators. Sprague indicated that a grand jury was considering an indictment, which could expand the charges, and told Laporte there had been other victims.

Mills has been "trying to hide from a long line of people who have been clamoring for him to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars," the prosecutor said.

He said Mills had cheated friends out of more than $600,000 in the Cisco takeover scam in 2013 alone and had taken $575,000 from Motionloft's account, in addition to his salary, during three years as CEO. Mills lied to landlords about his income, lied to court officers about his residence and paid an entertainer at a Las Vegas party with a $100,000 check that bounced, Sprague said.

Assistant Federal Public Defender Jodi Linker disputed Sprague's claim that Mills was likely to flee if released, saying he would be subject to electronic monitoring and "has no resources to go anywhere else."